My daddy always said “Never elect an honest man, holding an office will just make him a crook.” I guess that influenced me a lot. I often think that anyone wanting to run for office should be automatically disqualified. Why would anyone want to hold an elected office where every voter expects something in payment for their vote, and no matter what you do you are going to have about half the people mad at you all the time.
I am a one issue voter. I will never vote for anyone wanting to pass laws to restrict my 2nd Amendment rights. I have owned guns since I was six years old and got my first BB gun. My guns have provided me untold hours of fun shooting targets, have provided me food all my life and have given me the comfort of knowing I can take care of myself.
None of my guns have ever harmed another person, and they never will unless used to protect myself or someone else. So how does restricting my rights make a difference? If laws kept illegal things out of criminals’ hands, we would have no cocaine or heroin on our streets.
The election this year is a problem. Donald Trump has never been a gun rights person until recently. He says he has changed. Hillary Clinton has been anti-gun all her life. So do I vote for Trump and hope he does what he says about guns, or vote for Hillary and hope she does not do what she says she wants to do. To do that I would have to ignore everything else.
Recently Hillary said she wanted the same kinds of laws in the US that were passed in Australia. There, after a mass shooting in 1996, the government confiscated all semiautomatic rifles, pump and semiautomatic shotguns and almost all pistols. They said they would pay you if you turned in your banned gun by a certain time but after that they would just take it.
In 1988 25 percent of households in Australia had a gun, by 2005 only six percent had one. That is what Hillary wants for us.
Has it made a difference? The murder rate there dropped from 1.9 per 100,000 in 1993 to 1.3 in 2007, a tiny drop of six tenths of one percent. And it has not been a steady drop, in 2002 they had the highest number of murders there in 26 years. But in Australia, just like here, the murder rate had been dropping for years before they confiscated guns.
Some gun banners argue that confiscating guns will reduce mass shootings, like it did in Australia. But in this study – http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/Mass_shootings.pdf – the authors found there were so few mass shootings before gun confiscation that no before-and-after study could be done. They did compare New Zealand and Australia, two similar countries with very different gun laws, and found no difference because of the law. So, because of one mass shooting, a country confiscated over 600,000 guns, a high percentage of all guns in the country, and it has had no effect.
If Hillary got her way, the government would confiscate almost all my guns. Four they would take would be the Winchester Model 1893 pump 12 gauge my father inherited from his father and passed on to me, the Ithaca pump goose gun my father-in-law gave to me, the Browning semiautomatic long barreled 12 gauge my daddy shot doves with all his life and the Remington short barreled semiautomatic 12 gauge he shot quail with before passing them on to me. The government taking those guns away from me would really help with crime.
I will never support anyone wanting to follow Australia’s gun ban and confiscation law.